e
youth, anyway. Howells will be 88 in October.) With thanks again,

Sincerely yours,
S. L. C.

Clemens found that the air of the New Hampshire hills agreed with
him and stimulated him to work. He began an entirely new version of
The Mysterious Stranger, of which he already had a bulky and nearly
finished manuscript, written in Vienna. He wrote several hundred
pages of an extravaganza entitled, Three Thousand Years Among the
Microbes, and then, having got his superabundant vitality reduced
(it was likely to expend itself in these weird mental exploits),
he settled down one day and wrote that really tender and beautiful
idyl, Eve's Diary, which he had begun, or at least planned, the
previous summer at Tyringham. In a letter to Mr. Frederick A.
Duneka, general manager of Harper & Brothers, he tells something of
the manner of the story; also his revised opinion of Adam's Diary,
written in '93, and originally published as a souvenir of Niagara
Falls.

*****

To Frederick A. Duneka, in New York:

DUBLIN, July 16, '05.

DEAR MR. DUNEKA,--I wrote Eve's Diary, she using Adam's Diary as her
(unwitting and unconscious) text, of course, since to use any other text
would have been an imbecility--then I took Adam's Diary and read it.
It turned my stomach. It was not literature; yet it had been literature
once--before I sold it to be degraded to an advertisement of the Buffalo
Fair. I was going to write and ask you to melt the plates and put it out
of print.

But this morning I examined it without temper, and saw that if I
abolished the advertisement it would be literature again.

So I have done it. I have struck out 700 words and inserted 5 MS pages
of new matter (650 words), and now Adam's Diary is dam good--sixty times
as good as it ever was before.

I believe it is as good as Eve's Diary now--no, it's not quite that
good, I guess, but it is good enough to go in the same cover with Eve's.
I'm sure of that.

I hate to have the old Adam go out any more--don't put it on the presses
again, let's put the new one in place of it; and next Xmas, let us bind
Adam and Eve in one cover. They score points against each other--so, if
not bound together, some of the points would not be perceived.....

P. S. Please send another Adam's Di